Former MI5 boss Dame Stella Rimington attacks Wikileaks and US government security

Dame Stella Rimington, the Director General of MI5 from 1992 to 1996, criticised Wikileaks for endangering the lives of intelligence sources, and the US government over the security of its secret databases.

1:06PM BST 22 Aug 2012

Addressing a conference in Brisbane, Australia, the former MI5 chief said the release by Wikileaks of thousands of confidential US State Department diplomatic cables had endangered the lives of intelligence sources.

"What is not good or healthy, in my opinion, is the indiscriminate pouring out into the public domain of screeds of leaked documents by Julian Assange and his WikiLeaks organisation, including information about live sources in vulnerable positions, thereby putting their lives at risk".

But Dame Stella also criticised the USfor maintaining a "so-called secret database" which was accessible to a wide array of different people, and for the system by which they decided what information was kept on the database.

She predicted that the result of the Wikileaks scandal would be a reduction in the amount of information made available to the public.

"More and more information will be protected in more and more complex ways contributing to less rather than more openness..." she said.

Dame Stella is no stranger to the issue of data protection, having hit the headlines earlier this yearafter it was revealed she had lost a laptop at Heathrow Airport which was believed to contain contact details for former MI5 colleagues.